Designing software I find that I spend a lot of time with the user interface. The user interface is how a person interacts with a computer. I want to make it as initiative as possible. The gesture based interaction with computers that people used in the minority report looked very cool.
I wondered how long it would be before something like that could happen, so I did some done some research and found out that it is possible to duplicate some of that with current technology. It requires some hardware and software. The hardware part of it is kinect. Yes, the same kinect used with Xbox 360. Kinect is a 3d motion sensor and camera that allows people to interact with games by using gestures. A pc specific version of kinect is planned for release sometime in 2012.
There are six software packages I found that provide support of kinect on the pc.
1) Microsoft kinect sdk. This is free. It provides libraries for writing applications and drivers for kinect.
2) KinEmote. Free application.
3) OpenKinect. Free and open source sdk for kinect.
4) Evoluce Win&I($57). Commercial application which adds support to windows for using kinect with applications.
5) FAAST. USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies has created and released FAAST, or the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit. FAAST maps full body gestures to keyboard commands.
Windows 8 will have baked in support for kinect. Features like recognizing you when you approach your computer and logging on and locking the computer when you leave. The metro interface in windows 8 will also work really well with kinect. It is conceivable at some point that Windows will also be able to tell when you’re ticked off and offer assistance thanks to recognition of facial expressions. Sure hope that clippy doesn’t make a comeback though.
Here’s a video of FAAST in action controlling world of warcraft.
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